Going Deep: It's an uphill climb as girls try to establish themselves in wrestling in Pennsylvania

There are girls, and then there’s Romy Marszalek, whose reputation on the wrestling mat precedes her.

View full sizePaul Chaplin, The Patriot-NewsRomy Marszalek, 10, wrestles Alijah Wheeler in a 74 pound first round match during a youth wrestling tournament at Cedar Cliff High School

At 4-foot-6 and about 74 pounds, with mismatching green and pink laces on her boots, and painted fingernails – today, they’re blue, with yellow letters that spell CEDAR CLIFF when she puts both hands together – Romy strikes fear in the hearts of her opponents.

Well sort of.

There was the case of the boy who forfeited a match and refused to wrestle her because he was afraid of losing to a girl.

Then there was also the case of the boy who, as little boys sometimes do, dispatched his buddy to tell the cute, dark haired girl-wrestler that he had a crush on her ... only to realize later that he was scheduled to wrestle her.

This boy’s declaration of love unnerved Romy more than any trash talking ever could.

“He had his friend keep running up to us to say that he likes me, and he’s gonna kiss me, and he wants to marry me,” Romy says, grinning. “I was scared to go out there and wrestle, but I still did, and I beat him.”

This fourth-grader is already three years into her wrestling career, with a lifetime record that stands at 36-20. Thirty-three of those wins have come against boys.

Pre-puberty boys, though.

That makes a difference because neither Romy nor the boys she wrestles have hit the point where growth spurts and hormones set in.

Across town, in Red Land School District, sixth-grader Emily Myers is a newcomer to the wrestling scene. Her rookie season last year was shortened by injury, but she’s done well in some novice tournaments this year and finished with a 15-4 record.

At age 12, Myers stands a little closer to the point where physiology starts to make its presence known.

Her father, Eric, a former Red Land wrestler, says they are just starting to see the physical differences between Emily and the boys she goes up against.

In one recent bout against an East Pennsboro boy, for instance, Eric recalls eyeballing his daughter’s opponent and realizing that he was going to be tough to beat.

“This kid had wrestled since he was four. He had muscles, and you could sense she was going to have problems,” Eric says.

Emily lost that bout pretty quickly, though her father applauded her effort. But that’s the sort of thing that makes Eric wonder if there’s an unfortunate shelf life to Emily’s wrestling career

View full sizeJohn C. Whitehead, The Patriot-News, 2011Emily Myers, 12, takes a breather during wrestling practice at Red Land High School last week.

Unless there comes a day where girls in Pennsylvania will get to wrestle other girls in a separate girls’ scholastic wrestling circuit, this will always be a problem for budding female wrestlers hoping to stick with the sport all through high school.”My biggest fear is that coming into being a teenager, boys will tend to start getting a little bit stronger, and things like that,” Eric says. I do think she could compete at the high school level, but I don’t know how she would do.”

Lisa has sometimes found herself wondering the same thing about her daughter, Romy. Even though she has pledged to support her spunky, vivacious daughter in any athletic endeavor she decides to take on, there’s a part of her that wonders when the biology will start to get in the way of Romy’s progress on the mat.

“When they’re young, they’re all just kids, and they’re all kind of built the same,” Lisa says.

“As their bodies change, so do their muscular structures and all that stuff. So my concern is that it’s going to become harder and harder for her to continue to wrestle as the boys become more boy-like and she becomes more girl-like.

“I don’t know how long she’ll be able to continue being a female wrestler in a boy’s wrestling world.”

CARVING A NICHE FOR GIRLSAlmost 40 years after the passage of Title IX, in an era where just about every boys’ sport now has a girls’ equivalent, girls are still a rarity in the wrestling room.

But that is slowly changing.

Alaska’s Michaela Hutchison stamped her name in the record books in 2006 when she fought her way to a state title in the 103-pound weight class.

In 2011, Cassy Herkelman made national headlines when she became the first girl to win a match in the Iowa state championship tournament when her male opponent forfeited, citing personal beliefs that prevented him from wrestling a girl.

Last month, Bloomington, Ind., native Kayla Miracle broke barriers as the first girl to make to that state’s wrestling tournament final.

As these milestones fall, the profile of girls’ wrestling is growing. When Hutchison won her state title in 2006, Texas and Hawaii were the only two states in the nation that offered girls’ wrestling as a high school varsity sport, with official state championship tournaments in place.

Today, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, five states now sponsor girls’ wrestling championships, and the organization’s participation numbers show that the number of girls in wrestling has increased 40 percent since 2004.

That was the year women’s wrestling was accepted in the Olympics as a medal sport, which, many say, accelerated the growth of the sport among girls in the United States.

“Since then we’ve gotten more publicity, and it’s beginning to build,” says Ron Tirpak, who’s coached the U.S. women’s World Cup wrestling teams for the last two years. “Local colleges have picked up on it and it’s becoming more popular.”

He says he believes that women’s wrestling is poised for takeoff, and he would like Pennsylvania to get with the program.

Tirpak is also the founder of the Swarthmore-based Women Only Wrestling — the only exclusively women’s wrestling club east of the Mississippi.

Emily Myers is one of his wrestlers, as is Jennifer Chu, a former junior national champion who is now spearheading the movement to increase the number of female wrestlers in Pennsylvania.

As the women’s wrestling director of the Pennsylvania Amateur Wrestling Federation, Chu was instrumental in organizing the inaugural Pennsylvania Girls’ State Wrestling Championships, which will take place at Susquehanna Twp. High School this Sunday.

“This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while,” says Chu, a Philadelphia native who started a women’s club wrestling team during her senior year of high school, then continued with the sport through college. “I think the number of girls [in] wrestling is increasing, but it’s a Catch-22: you’re not going to increase interest until you provide opportunities for girls in the sport, but people generally don’t want to provide opportunities unless there’s interest.”

View full sizePaul Chaplin, The Patriot-NewsRomy Marszalek, 10, is one of a growing number of girls in youth wrestling.

Chu is hopeful that anywhere between 100 to 150 wrestlers will compete in the tournament. Wrestlers don’t need to qualify, but in the interest of making this a true state championship, only Pennsylvania residents are eligible to compete.

“We’re trying to keep it as official as possible,” Chu says. “We’re having official weights, and if the girl is the only girl in her weight class, we’ll give her a gold medal and try to get her some exhibition matches.”

That fact that it’s going to be held in Harrisburg on the same weekend as the PIAA boys’ state wrestling tournament is also not a coincidence.

“We want the PIAA to take notice of it, so we’re going to hold the championships in one day, and we intentionally picked the Hershey-Harrisburg area and intentionally picked this date so that it gets noticed and people realize there’s another wrestling championship out there and that this one is all-women,” says Van Plocus, the state chairman of the Pennsylvania Amateur Wrestling Federation.

“Pennsylvania is the strongest wrestling state in the nation, but the girls have found themselves having to wrestle in the boys’ programs.

“I think in the next few years that will change because high schools will pick up varsity women’s wrestling.”

REALITY?Girls’ varsity high school wrestling might be a little farther away in the future than Plocus hypothesizes, given the current economic crisis that has most high schools scrambling to find ways to trim their budgets.

Also, it’s not going to be easy to convince the PIAA to adopt girls’ wrestling as an officially sanctioned sport.

PIAA assistant executive director Bob Lombardi was not aware of this PAWF girls’ state wrestling tournament, and he says a motion to introduce girls’ wrestling as a PIAA sport would have to come from the member schools.

“Schools would have to embrace it and start it at the district level,” Lombardi says. “It has not been an agenda item with the wrestling steering committee, and the number [of girls] participating in wrestling at districts is very small.”

But Plocus and Tirpak maintain that the interest is there, even if this isn’t reflected in the NFHS’ participation numbers — which list the number of female high school wrestlers in Pennsylvania as zero.

“Zero is completely wrong,” Tirpak says, pointing out that in itself is evidence that there are probably a lot more female wrestlers in youth and high school wrestling than most state associations believe.

“Pennsylvania is the preeminent state in boys wrestling. If they go ‘zero’ with us, what are they doing in some of the other states?”

There’s some truth to that line of thought.

The NFHS gets their participation statistics from the state organizations, such as the PIAA.

According to the PIAA, they estimate these participation numbers by averaging roster numbers of teams in the state championships and multiplying that by the number of teams statewide.

Conversely, the National Wrestling Coaches Association gets their data from the results of a hydration test that every wrestler has to submit at the beginning of the season in order to compete. Their records show that there were 65 female high school-age wrestlers in Pennsylvania this season.One of those was Lower Dauphin freshman Amanda Vale, who wrestled junior varsity for the Falcons this year and who will compete in this weekend’s girls’ state championship tournament.

View full sizeCourtesy photo, Vale FamilyAmanda Vale (in blue-and-white) was on the Lower Dauphin junior varsity wrestling squad this year. She hopes to get the Falcons to start a girls team down the road.

The Vales moved from California to Pennsylvania at the beginning of this school year, and Amanda and her eighth-grade sister, Brianna, both fell into wrestling because of their background in mixed martial arts.

Competing with the boys was intimidating at first, says Amanda, 15.

“I saw all these guys who were like, brawny, on my team. And I was like ‘Wow, I have to compete with that?’”

Over time she got more comfortable with her new teammates.

“They got over the fact I was a girl and started being nice and stuff,” Amanda says.

Her background in muay thai and jiujitsu helped her in the wrestling room, but the learning curve was steep, and Amanda didn’t win a match all year.

That’s not going to stop her. She has already decided that she wants to stick with wrestling for the rest of her high school career, and she’s determined to get better to try to keep up with the boys.

“I’m going to start lifting and stuff, and working on my upper body, to get stronger,” she says.

She’s also looking forward to next year because Brianna will be a high school freshman and she’ll join her sister on the wrestling team.

The Vale sisters, Romy Marzsalek, and Emily Myers are proof that there are girls in Pennsylvania who are interested in wrestling. But as long as girls are stuck wrestling on boys teams, it will be difficult for them to find success at the highest levels of the sport.

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